GW approximation study of late transition metal oxides: Spectral function clusters around Fermi energy as the mechanism behind smearing in momentum density

Abstract

Momentum density studies are the key tool in Fermiology in which electronic structure calculations have proven to be the integral underlying methodology. Agreements between experimental techniques such as Compton scattering experiments and conventional density functional calculations for late transition metal oxides (TMOs) prove elusive. In this work, we report improved momentum densities of late TMOs using the GW approximation (GWA) which appears to smear the momentum density creating occupancy above the Fermi break. The smearing is found to be largest for NiO and we will show that it is due to more spectra surrounding the NiO Fermi energy compared to the spectra around the Fermi energies of FeO and CoO. This highlights the importance of the positioning of the Fermi energy and the role played by the self-energy term to broaden the spectra and we elaborate on this point by comparing the GWA momentum densities to their LDA counterparts and conclude that the larger difference at the intermediate level shows that the self-energy has its largest effect in this region. We finally analyzed the quasiparticle renormalization factor and conclude that an increase of electrons in the [Formula: see text]-orbital from FeO to NiO plays a vital role in changing the magnitude of electron correlation via the self-energy.